Do you have an idea? I have twenty. On inspiration and crankiness, by Harini Nagendra

Not "where" do you get your ideas, but HOW? Do they come to you as images? Memories? Overheard conversations?

One of the professors in the institution where I did my PhD - the Indian Institute of Science - was infamous for his habit of deflating students, puncturing their excitement and generally running them down. 

"XXX!" one of his students was said to have shouted, running towards him down the long stone corridors at top speed, waving his hands. "I have an idea." 

XXX sneered at him. "One idea? I have twenty." 

It's easy to get ideas, he meant. Converting them into reality is hard.

Is that true? Perhaps. But in fiction writing, it's different. At times I find it very hard to get the ideas going, and at other times they come thick and fast. 

Kaveri Murthy, the main character in my Bangalore Detectives Club series, parachuted into my mind fully formed. Where did she come from? Who knows. I didn't really have a clear image of what she looked like, but I knew her mind - how she thought, what she wanted, how she would behave in any given situation. Several of the other characters in my books walked onto the page - like Mala, the beautiful young woman forced into relationships with other men by a notorious local pimp - or gentle but incisively brilliant Inspector Ismail.  

Dialogue is harder than characters, but I take my inspiration from fragments, overheard conversations. One woman was talking to another as I walked past - mimicking her neighbour who spoke non-stop, "going wata wata wata." That grabbed me, and I instantly put it into my book.   

Plots are the most difficult. I comb newspapers and old books - memoirs of travelers, policemen's autobiographies, cases written up in old magazines - and then pick the ones I like. Or I go down research rabbit holes, reading compulsively about fox hunts in Bangalore, foreign magicians who dressed up in blackface as Indian fakirs, and women wrestlers who joined the Bombay circus. The words I read linger in my mind, simmer on long walks, cook slowly during weekends spent doing other things - and suddenly, in the mysterious way plots do, they morph and twist and twine and intersplice - and then I have a plot. 

Or - equally likely - I read about interesting ideas, but they stubbornly refuse to transform into anything. I stare at the wall, fretting in impatience at plot holes - and then plod away stodgily at my writing.

I've now written four non-fiction books and four fiction books. Writing non-fiction is so much easier - making things up is hard. But it's so much fun when it suddenly clicks, and a new plot comes together...

Which reminds me, time to get started on book 5 in The Bangalore Detectives Club series...